Do social media and networking platforms unfairly restrict speech and content by users expressing certain political views? Is the “marketplace of ideas” subject to entry barriers imposed by the platforms themselves? Twitter has been in the news recently for a “Block & Report Spam” feature whereby complaints can trigger a suspension. Some claim that leftists are gaming the system to take down certain posters. Twitter claims to never filter or moderate content proactively, but the system seems to invite abuse by activists at either end of the political spectrum.

Facebook admits that it attempts to enforce a set of “community standards” that cover the general areas of safety, respect (covering hate speech and nudity), security, and intellectual property. There is ample evidence, however, that enforcement of these standards is “arbitrary and capricious“. Examples range from inconsistent treatment of “Death to Israel” posts, images of buttocks, sculptures or drawings of body parts vs. actual body parts, and a variety of gay-themed images. These cases and many others are likely a consequence of different moderators responding to complaints differently in attempts to interpret and enforce rules that are vague by necessity. In addition, decisions to censor or suspend users are sometimes reversed by committee at higher levels, only to be made again later. And there have been allegations that content from advertisers is treated with a “lighter touch” than from non-advertisers. Perhaps the organization is simply trying to find a fair way to moderate the complicated social thicket, but the effort seems largely misplaced. A broader policy of content neutrality and allowing users to censor their feeds for themselves, as they are empowered to do, would avoid many of the inconsistencies.

“They were also told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like the New York Times, Time, Variety, and other traditional outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets…. News curators also have the power to “deactivate” (or blacklist) a trending topic—a power that those we spoke to exercised on a daily basis. A topic was often blacklisted if it didn’t have at least three traditional news sources covering it, but otherwise the protocol was murky—meaning a curator could ostensibly blacklist a topic without a particularly good reason for doing so.“

This has the potential to create a bias in favor of certain viewpoints. If a trending topic comes from a source or involves a viewpoint that is not in favor, “news curation” amounts to a distasteful cover for outright political censorship. The Facebook system is also vulnerable to the sort of “mobbing” by activists that has been problematic for Twitter. Some of the complaints against unfair treatment by Facebook undoubtedly have merit. Such bias could have an influence sufficiently great to alter election outcomes.

Some forms of censorship on these platforms may be justified, such as preventing threats, abuse or harassment. As well, the platforms are required to comply with laws that are more restrictive in certain countries. Nevertheless, whatever the content standards, and whatever political bias might be created, the platforms are operated by private entities. They can do whatever they want, as much as anyone might hate it. The accusers are entitled to complain, of course, but they should bear in mind that these platforms are not exactly an open marketplace or a public square, however tempting it is to think of them that way. They could be open and free, given a more enlightened approach by the organizations that run them, but as things stand they are not. Positive action remains an option for those who object: agitate, package your content more carefully, or get off the platform and find an on-line community to your liking.

Take a moment to consider some examples of the horrible misuse of words in political debates. David Harsanyi at Reason provides a few choice examples of the corrupted and misleading language used by Democrats:

the absence of a tax that “should” exist but doesn’t is a “loophole”;

failure to pay that tax is a “fraud”;

denial of “access” occurs when the state doesn’t give something to you for free;

“disenfranchisement” means you have to show an ID or wait in line;

“full rights” means the entire world must be a “safe space” for your actions or views, even if the rights of others are denied in the process.

These are all recent examples of mangled language from the two candidates for the Democrat Party nomination. But here’s a big one that Harsanyi overlooked: the misuse of the term “liberalism” to describe statism. In fact, he misuses the word “liberals” himself! In “Don’t Call Leftists Liberal; They’re Not!” on Sacred Cow Chips, I offered some thoughts on this bit of Newspeak practiced by so-called progressives. I can’t resist reposting the following quote of Daniel Klein quoting Kevin Williamson, which says it all (links are in the original post):

“Williamson [quotes] two leftist authors writing in The Nation, one decrying ‘unbridled individualism,’ the other ‘unfettered capitalism.’ Williamson concludes: ‘A ‘liberalism’ that is chiefly concerned with the many clever uses of bridles and fetters does not deserve the name. It never has.’”

The following quote from Harsanyi gives emphasis to the wrongful appropriation of “liberalism” by the left, though it relates more specifically to the misuse of the term “loophole”:

“Basically, all of life is a giant loophole until Democrats come up with a way to regulate or tax it. In its economic usage, “loophole” … creates the false impression that people are getting away with breaking the law. It’s a way to skip the entire debate portion of the conversation and get right to the accusation.“

Another behavioral characteristic of leftists is a certain self-righteous satisfaction that they hold the moral high ground on any number of issues. “The Smug Style in American Liberalism“by Emmitt Rensin in Vox takes a poke at this presumption. Of course, Rensin misuses “liberalism”. I find this review of the article by Kyle Smith an effective summary, and it’s even better because it skips what comes off as a long catalog of excuses by Rensin as to why leftists might be forgiven for patting themselves on the back. I give Rensin credit, however, for a good analysis of the origins of leftist “smug”, which he attributes to a backlash against defections from the Democrat coalition by working-class voters in the second half of the twentieth century. And I credit Rensin for his ultimate condemnation of undeserved leftist attitudes of superiority. Here are some difficult realities for the left cited by Rensin:

“Nothing is more confounding to the smug style than the fact that the average Republican is better educated and has a higher IQ than the average Democrat. That for every overpowered study finding superior liberal open-mindedness and intellect and knowledge, there is one to suggest that Republicans have the better of these qualities.“

Perhaps inventing new definitions for words in the service of rhetoric comes easy with pomposity. In the end, assertions that the left is more “caring”, “tolerant” or “peaceful” are balderdash. There are honest policy debates to be had about the best way to solve social problems and respect for the rights of others, but having experienced angry reactions in debate with befuddled leftists for myself, I wholly concur with this Kyle Smith observation:

Here’s a post-debate follow-up on Donald Trump the Shape Shifter: I’m surprised to hear anyone praising his performance after that debacle. He came off as a dick, and that’s really The Donald. I thought so before I heard that he suggested Megyn Kelly was menstruating that evening. Megan was tough, but please…. Trump is a loud-mouthed, offensive, and often incoherent bully.

Two Trump moments that I thought were amazing were his exchange with Brett Baier about political donations and his dust-up with Rand Paul over a single-payer health care system.

On donations, Trump seemed to take satisfaction in the fact that Hillary Clinton “had no choice” but to attend his wedding after he gave to her Senate campaign. He then made the following statement, which made me laugh:

“I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.“

Should I love him or hate him for that statement? He admits with no shame that he participates in crony capitalism, and he realizes that it’s corrupt. Andrew Popkin at Vox has a good analysis:

“Something Trump identifies that doesn’t always get mentioned is the way transactional politics transcend partisanship and ideology. Trump gave to Democrats and he gave to Republicans. He didn’t care what they believed. He cared what they could do for him. He wasn’t supporting them — he was buying them, and that’s completely different.“

It’s convenient for Trump to brag that he doesn’t need donations from others when campaigning. When he’s on the other side of the table, he’s happy to participate in the corruption. Did Trump buy the politicians who helped him arrange eminent domain actions against property owners who were in the way of his developments? He’s also quite proud of his use of bankruptcy laws allowing him to stiff lenders and investors in his enterprises. By the way, in comparing his four corporate bankruptcies to the many “deals” he’s executed over the years, he’d have you believe that the “deal” is always the relevant unit for a bankruptcy proceeding. That’s loose and misleading jargon.

I have said that Trump’s supporters really don’t know what their getting. Perhaps he won’t tell anyone because he’d lose “leverage”. A prime example of Trump’s shiftiness was his response to the following question on single-payer health care systems, including his attempt to embarrass Rand Paul:

Baier: “Now, 15 years ago, you called yourself a liberal on health care. You were for a single-payer system, a Canadian-style system. Why were you for that then and why aren’t you for it now?“

As Peter Suderman noted, Trump’s response to this question about health care began with his views on the war in Iraq. Donald’s rules…. But eventually, he addressed the health care question with a stream of words that thinking people might have been tempted to process logically in order to divine a coherent “Trump” position on the issue, but that would have been a mistake:

“As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.

What I’d like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state. I have a big company with thousands and thousands of employees. And if I’m negotiating in New York or in New Jersey or in California, I have like one bidder. Nobody can bid. You know why? Because the insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians, of course, with the exception of the politicians on this stage. But they have total control of the politicians. They’re making a fortune.“

This is not a great moment of clarity for Trump. We still don’t know what he has in mind. He demonstrates that he doesn’t quite understand the inherent flaws in single-payer. If his complaint is with consolidation of the health insurance industry, single-payer would imply an even greater consolidation, indeed, a monopoly. A “private system” does not rule out single-payer. While the insurance companies have undoubtedly influenced politicians, just as Trump has, why is he complaining about a lack of choice, having just asserted that single-payer could work so well? And artificial lines have to do with non-price rationing, a typical feature of government intervention in markets. Thus far, the profits of under-pricing insurers have been protected by so-called “risk corridors” built into Obamacare. Would Trump allow health care providers and insurers to reprice in order to eliminate “artificial lines”? Trump’s words did not settle any questions about his position.

The end of Trump’s response is this:

“And then we have to take care of the people that can’t take care of themselves. And I will do that through a different system.“

So… was Trump still talking about single-payer or not? I forgive Rand Paul for imagining that he was. It was the only solid statement that one could cling to in Trump’s ramble.

Here is Suderman’s summary of Trump’s response with an account of the exchange with Rand Paul that followed:

“What matters is that [Trump] would be different. Different how? So very, very different—and definitely not a moron/loser/dummy/incompetent (pick one) like this other guy.

This is how Trump responds to almost everything: By not answering the question, by babbling out some at-best semi-relevant references, by promising to somehow be different and better without explaining how or why, and then by lobbing an insult.

An insult is how Trump finishes the Obamacare exchange as well. After Trump finishes answering the question, Sen. Rand Paul cuts in, saying, ‘News flash, the Republican Party’s been fighting against a single-payer system for a decade. So I think you’re on the wrong side of this if you’re still arguing for a single-payer system.’ [SCC’s bolding]

The gist, as always, is that someone else—indeed, practically everyone else—is a dummy, a loser, a politician. Trump is the only one who really gets it, whatever it is.“

While I thought Rand Paul’s interjectory approach to debating was unwise, his comment to Trump was on-target, and he even qualified it. Trump responded with snark. Trump has yet to take a real position on health care in this campaign, but he has supported single-payer in the past. He doesn’t want to go to the trouble of deciding or revealing a specific plan just yet. Perhaps he’s “maintaining leverage”, keeping his options open, because he’s such a smart businessman. If you want to treat politics like a business deal, fine, but smart voters should be your partners, and they will expect you to reveal your terms.

I witness so many calls for censorship on a day-to-day basis that I find it astonishing. This in a free society, and from people who fancy themselves liberal. They prefer a form of censorship that carries criminal penalties for speech that does not meet with approval by media “fact checkers”. Which fact checkers shall we choose? Will they be fact-checking juries of our peers, or a new cadre of officials donning armbands?

Does anyone truly believe that the branch of the media engaged in “fact-checking” is objective? Andrew Gripp covers this topic, demonstrating that the assessment of “facts” often doesn’t stand the test of time. Fact checkers will call a statement false, only to rule otherwise years later, or vice versa. That’s just how it went down with President Obama’s pronouncement that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan”. True in 2008, false in 2013. Would Obama receive an exemption under this approach?

But that is just one way in which the fact checkers go wrong. More basic is the fact that the assessments they make are essentially opinions! Gripp puts his finger on the primary weakness of the fact-checking industry:

“… it is important to remember that old Enlightenment figure Giambattista Vico’s verum factum principle: the truth is made — made by people with their own biases, limitations, and subjective standards.“

As part of the same censorious narrative, I sometimes hear that Canada “bans” Fox News. This is patently false, as Snopes asserts. Another trope is that Fox News lies 50% of the time, or 82% of the time, or some such claim that should immediately set off the BS alarm of any discerning observer. I get aggravated with certain things I hear on Fox too, but as an empiricist, this just smells like BS. Kevin Williamson shreds these reports as exercises in bias in a piece entitled “How Stupid Happens“:

“The most obvious problem — though certainly not the only problem, not even close — is selection bias: PolitiFact is a readership-driven online publication, and thus it exercises a great deal of discretion about which statements it chooses to evaluate and why. The most obvious factor is that it evaluates only statements that are disputed. Specifically, it evaluates only statements that are disputed and that its editors believe will be of some interest or benefit to its readers. …

But the fact is that unsupportable, boneheaded claims … will live forever, because people are mostly interested in having their biases confirmed and their values affirmed rather than learning new things about the world and how it works. True, much as I like yelling at people on television, it is pretty hard to feel too bad for Fox News and MSNBC over an exercise in confirmation bias, but this sort of sloppy thinking and malicious manipulation does have the effect of leaving the polity a little dumber than it absolutely has to be. And that is an unforgivable sin.“

In many respects, it feels like this topic is hardly worth a blog post, because the wannabe censors exist in an impenetrable ideological bubble. But on the other hand, they are little tyrants, not merely content to seek a monopoly over the market place of ideas, which is bad enough. They also seek to criminalize statements with which they happen to disagree. There is no doubt that they would burn books. Their ideas are dangerous and should not be treated with respect in a free society.

Are you White? Asian? Male? A stay-at-home mom? Or maybe your family earns too much? Or your parents did? If any of those are “yes”, you just might be disqualified to engage in debate with those who self-proclaim their big-heartedness. You won’t be disqualified if your views are deemed “correct”, but then “debate” won’t really be an issue. If your views are “incorrect”, your privileged-group status is the stain of original sin, as Warren Meyer would say. Not only are you disqualified; you are an appropriate target for ad hominems.

“… the sins of past generations somehow accrue to individuals of this generation. If you are male, you are born guilty for the infractions of all past males.“

Meyer mentions the recent incident involving Ben Affleck, who asked the host of a PBS documentary to omit any mention of a slave-owning Affleck ancestor:

“So an ancestor held opinions about slavery we all would find horrifying today. But given the times, I can bet that pretty much every relative of Affleck’s of that era, slaveholder or no, held opinions (say about women) that we would likely find offensive today.

Congrats to Affleck for achieving some negative alchemy here. He took an issue (his ancestor’s slave-holding) that did not reflect on him at all and converted it via some “I am a star” douchebaggery into something that makes him look like a tool.”

In addition to the demographic origins of sin mentioned above, you are likely to be stained if you believe in the profit motive, gun rights, or any number of other individual liberties. If you can’t be marked as a sinner by some privileged-group identity, the Left will find another label. If you are a black conservative, you will be called an “Uncle Tom”. Dealing with your arguments is just too inconvenient. As Meyer mentions in another recent post, Leftists are particularly unlikely to pass Bryan Caplan’s Ideological Turing test. They simply don’t listen to, or understand, other points of view.

Bias in academic research is more common than most people realize. Some recent posts on this topic by Lee Jussim on the Psychology TodayRabble Rouser blog caught my eye. In “Psychology’s Political Diversity Problem“, Jussim shows the abstract of a paper he coauthored on the decline in political diversity among psychological researchers, and the nefarious effects that decline has had on the scope and quality of research. From the abstract:

“This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike;”

Similar phenomena can and have corrupted other areas of research, such as climate science, in which outright fraud has been committed (East Anglia, temperature records) amid a breakdown in the integrity of the peer-review process. The destructive mechanisms, according to Jussim and his coauthors, are “self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination” against researchers holding minority views. I would add that research often will be colored when future funding is perceived as contingent on the nature of the findings.

Jussim follows up with another post on the Rabble Rouser blog entitled “Liberal Bias Distorts Scientific Psychology (and Education)“. In this post, he links to a “disclaimer” essentially stating that his conclusions are NOT a condemnation of the personal morals, competence, or fair-mindedness of so-called liberals in his profession (I disagree with his use of the term “liberal”– these are leftists, not real liberals). He also elaborates on the article he coauthored and provides links on various dimensions of the topic, such as this post by economist Michael Munger entitled “Our higher education system fails leftist students.” From Munger:

“Our colleagues on the left could choose to educate their liberal students, but since education requires ‘collision with error,’ that is no longer possible. That’s because the faculty on the left were themselves educated by neglect, never confronting counterarguments, in a now self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance and ideological bigotry.”

Of course, none of this is new. Bryan Caplan, who is a big fan of the Jussim article,confronted the same topic ten years ago as it pertained then (and still does) to academic economists:

“Even if we control for quality of publications, the gatekeepers – journal editors and referees – also feel virtually no financial cost of rejecting articles they find ideologically distasteful. So there is probably more discrimination against right-wingers than the data suggest, not less. …

If there is no discrimination, how does it happen that Alex [Tabarrok] and I and half the other staunch libertarian economists in the world are all in the same department? Segregation is the predicted effect of worker-on-worker discrimination. And that’s what we see.”

These are the lamentations of some extremely talented academics, not amateurs or pseudoscientists. This is not sour grapes; they are all engaged in a principled fight against bad odds. More importantly, they marshall powerful arguments that their respective fields of study suffer greatly from the effects of “monoculturalism”. After all, differences and argument are the essence of vibrant research and, ultimately, truth-seeking.

In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads---in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. -- Jacques Barzun